M-series have a substantially wider memory bus allowing much higher throughput. It's not really an x86/M-series thing, rather it's a packaging limitation. Apple integrates the memory into the same package as the CPU, the vast majority of x86 CPUs are socketed with socketed memory.
Apple are able to push a wider bus at higher frequencies because they aren't limited by signal integrity problems you encounter trying to do the same over sockets and motherboard traces. x86 CPUs like the Ryzen AI Max 395+, when packaged without socketed memory, are able to push equally wide busses at high frequencies.
The sibling comment has the correct, more detailed answer, but the high-level answer is that the M-series chips are SoCs with all the RAM on-die. That lets you push way more data than you can over a bus out to socketed memory.
The tradeoff is that it's non-upgradeable, but (contra some people who claim this is only a cash-grab by Apple to prevent RAM upgrades) it's worth it for the bandwidth.
Apple had soldered DDR ram for a long time that was no faster than any other laptop. It's only with the Apple Silicon M1 that it started being notably higher bandwidth.
> The tradeoff is that it's non-upgradeable, but (contra some people who claim this is only a cash-grab by Apple to prevent RAM upgrades) it's worth it for the bandwidth.
That, and if you come at it from the phone / tablet or even laptop angle: most people are quite ok just buying their computing devices pre-assembled and not worrying about upgrading them. You just buy a new one when the old one fails or you want an upgrade.
Similar to how cars these days are harder to repair for the layman, but they also need much less maintenance. The guy who was always tinkering away with his car in old American sitcoms wasn't just a trope, he was truth-in-television. Approximately no one has to do that anymore with modern cars.
The memory is in-package, not on-die - on-die would mean that the DRAM is being manufactured on the same 1-2-3-4-whatever nanometer process - DDR is much larger.
You're romanticizing, sadly. Every time I see someone scratching off numbers, I see a twisted industry exploiting human hopefulness and naivety. Dreaming costs nothing.
When I see office workers walking off to the dreamer highrise offices in the sky, I enviously dream of being that worker in the sky, with all those dreams of grandeur.
I play the national lottery in the UK mainly because of the good causes it supports. Athletes competing in the Olympics for Team GB for example receive significant funding from the lottery. I see my ticket as a charity donation with the added fun of an astronomically small chance of winning money.
There's a property website which covers my local area, and every few weeks I'll do a search for the city-center, and sort by highest-price.
It's fun to look at the kinda house you could buy if you had €5 million in the bank. Even though I'd never have that much, and even if I did I wouldn't spend it on such a thing.
That's a habit I picked up when I lived in the UK and I played their national lottery once every month or so.
(/r/SpottedonRightmove/ is also a fun sub if you like this kinda thing; "right move" is a UK estate agents chain.)
Couldn’t the dreaming be done even without betting? This feels like an excuse to me to be completely honest.
I’ve personally had thoughts about what I would do if I were millionaire, and given the amount of stories of people coming into a large sums of money and their life getting significantly worse, I’d prefer to actually not win it.
Presumably its easier to dream when there is an unpredictable outcome, rather than knowing you have to wake up tomorrow to spend the day driving around and pissing in bottles.
An outside force that could change circumstances is a better feeling than knowing that really isn't any way of changing your career when you can't go to school because you can't afford it.
That law, as per its name, applies to headlines in publications, not literally every question. Otherwise the answer to everything would be “no”.
> Presumably its easier to dream when there is an unpredictable outcome
Anecdotally, I know almost no one who plays the lottery, but almost everyone at some point has shared an “if I won the lottery” dream. Playing isn’t a prerequisite. It’s not too different from dreaming of becoming a rockstar when you can’t even play an instrument. Most of us have some version of that, no money necessary.
That’s a rather silly view to take. We have a phenomenon called “the first mover advantage” for a reason.
Plenty of other markets and businesses operate just fine while operating in an environment that makes protecting individual innovation functionally impossible. Just look at any related to fast fashion (not that I think the fast fashion market is a healthy phenomenon) or any commodities market. Or for that matter, most of the software industry.
The incentive for creating features should be to remain relevant and competitive. It shouldn’t be to build moats and war chests.
I don't understand. Robust markets don't have large margins. Why would a regulator even want markets with enormous margin? That's usually market failure.
Most people also complain about how pharmaceuticals are greedy corporations that seek to exploit monopoly status for profits above human health. Hardly a good example of a well functioning market.
Are you trying suggest that Apple’s margins are so small that they need state protection? Or that Apple can’t compete if they’re not able to tightly lock down every aspect of their ecosystem?
Apple giving themselves an advantage in the markets for headphones and watches, because they have a dominant position in the market for phones is a textbook case of monopoly abuse.
They've done extra work to cripple competing devices. It's obnoxious.
That depends on the interpretation of a market, which is why laws like the DMA establish a market based on its size. In the iOS market, apple have a monopoly.
EDIT: Downvotes for what? That’s literally what the DMA is for. If you don’t like it, take it up with your representatives - it’s nothing to do with me.
So if a company creates a widget and sells that widget, thereby creating a market, they are automatically a monopoly? how is anything invented without creating a monopoly?
Also why is it an iOS market and not a mobile phone market? if we compare features of devices then there’s not a lot of difference between modern phones, so segregating them by what OS they run seems odd.
I would agree in general, but in this specific case it’s still an advantage for the iOS platform in general. It just removes a buying incentive for the AirPods.
The general problem is that there must be a line.
Vendors don’t create lock-ins because they are malicious, they create it because it makes them money.
Now, if we limit these lock-ins, it will reduce their ability to make money and yes, it will impact some features - short term.
But looking at it long terms, vendor lock-ins are actually a reason to stop innovating: your customers are locked in anyway.
So, overall, I would say this is good for innovation in general.
I actually have a problem with this. I want AirPods to be undeniably the best experience for me because I am fully locked into the Apple ecosystem, and I know many folks have complaints against that. I find it to be rather pleasurable to use compared to all the other alternatives out there. So if I have to start sacrificing my experience in favor of universal support, that really sucks.
But this isn't sacrificing your experience, you're free to keep using your Apple AirPods with the quality and reliability you'd expect from Apple. This just means other brands can create products with similar features to AirPods, and if they're not as good or reliable, well that's why you're paying Apple for theirs.
It removes incentives to differentiate a platform because the EU will just come in and make every company exactly the same by forcing others to allow other companies access to their R&D budgets. Why bother? It’s easier to just avoid the EU market
The best code is no code. Every line of extra code added, and every extra platform supported is potential for more bugs, which has the potential to affect my user experience.
I'm not seeing an incentive structure for them to change being the only source of good workflows for their users - it's their whole thing "It just works" - regardless of if it's true in practice or not.
If you want the "it just works" experience, you can still buy the Apple products though, that's not changing. You just also have the option to not do so.
which other company spends as much investing in UX? there is not a single other company on the planet with as polished of a user experience as apple, so who would develop a better workflow?
They did their initial AirPod implementation in a pretty insecure manner because it was securely locked to their hardware and they could trust themselves to not be malicious. If they have to build a feature, plus all the security around it, plus documentation, etc… it makes it much harder to bring to market. They may opt to skip it in favor of something else.
the long term innovation outlooks are still better, so you benefit long term as well.
It’s just less obvious / measurable that immediate benefits.
And also, short term, isn’t it that other EarPods are getting better, rather than AirPods getting worse?
Medium term, I don’t think that Apple will stop innovating on AirPods just because of the EU market and this one feature not being exclusive to AirPods anymore. But it’s a possibility, I agree.
Laws that mandate interoperability between devices are a net win for individual consumers and the market as a whole. They simplify people's lives, make society more efficient, prevent opportunities for blatant rent seeking and ultimately foster market productivity.
A government mandating standards in electricity transmission or gasoline composition may disincentivize the development of features that make some people's devices incompatible with charging at certain locations or cars that can only use gas from certain gas stations but that is the opposite of a bad thing.
We live in a much better world because people in the past decided that all telephones should be able to make calls to each other and that people don't really have to think about messing up putting fuel in their car because the size of the nozzles at pumps are standardized.
There are absolutely more opportunities for governments to make small but objectively measurable improvements in society with well placed regulations on interoperability.
Isn't Apple currently disincentivized to make features because they don't even allow competing smartwatches to access a basic feature set on iPhone?
You're basically saying Apple would be disincentivized to innovate on the Apple Watch because Apple would need to release the underlying APIs that make those work with the phone to competing solutions. But the status quo is that competing solutions that are already better than the Apple Watch straight up aren't allowed on the platform, and the Apple Watch generally costs more than its competitors.
You are unintentionally saying that if Apple had to allow third parties to use their private APIs, that the Apple Watch would have to cost less and/or innovate more in order to convince us all to buy it instead of buying a watch from Samsung or Google.
What you are describing is a more competitive and open market where consumers benefit from lower prices and more of an incentive to innovate and justify high prices.
I would also dispute the notion that merely releasing these APIs would somehow give away all your secret sauce. Competitors still have to build the experience on top of that.
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